If his name appeared on the inventions of his manufacture the name of John M. Browning would today
be more widely known than that of Henry Ford.”

– Philip B. Sharpe, author of The Rifle in America

The rhythmic ringing of a hammer striking an anvil was one of the first sounds to welcome John Moses Browning into the world. The sound echoed throughout his life, beginning with his earliest memories inside his father’s modest gun shop in Ogden.

Born Jan. 23, 1855, in Ogden, Utah Territory, John was the son of Jonathan Browning, a devout member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a respected gunsmith, and one of 22 children. Rutted wagon tracks led into the burgeoning settlement, marking a trail that dated to the great migration of 1846-47 and continued with pioneers pushing west to the Pacific Coast. Inside, he found his childhood wonderland of tools and gun parts. Elizabeth Browning remembered her son, no more than 6, dragging a box into the shop as a makeshift bench beside his father’s sizeable junk pile. Jonathan never discarded metal, knowing its value on the frontier, so the pile constantly shifted and changed.

So, too, did his son.

Jonathan’s sharp memory recalled every part he had salvaged from battered firearms. When he needed a piece, he sent John to dig through “Pappy’s” pile, then clean off rust with a file and buffer. The shop was John’s gunsmithing classroom – arguably his only one. He attended school intermittently until 15 and preferred to shadow his father.

Jonathan had learned the trade in Tennessee. In 1824, at 19, he walked 30 miles to a Nashville gunsmith whose name he had seen stamped on a barrel, offering to work free in exchange for lessons. He paid his dues.

Under that tutelage, John memorized every part, learned its function and soon imagined ways to build better guns. From this beginning emerged one of history’s most prolific firearms inventors. He obtained 128 patents covering 80 distinct guns and is widely considered a pioneer of modern repeating, semiautomatic and automatic arms.

He earned his first patent Oct. 7, 1879, at 24, and later sold designs to such industry leaders as Winchester, Remington and Colt. His output was so prolific he became known as “the Edison of Guns.” Between Oct. 1884 and Sept. 1886 Winchester alone bought 11 of his guns.

Author Paul A. Curtis, a retired U.S. Army captain and firearms authority, wrote in 1931:

“It is difficult to find words to accurately describe John Browning’s achievements. To say that he was a great gun designer is inadequate; to say that he was the Edison of the modern firearms industry does not quite cover the case either, for he was even greater than that. There are and were many great men working along the same lines as Edison – Steinmetz, Westinghouse, Marconi and others too numerous to mention – but Browning was unique. He stood alone, and there never was
in his time or before one whose genius along these lines could remotely compare with his.”

By the close of World War I, his reputation was secure. The U.S. Army Ordnance Corps asked if he could build a .50-caliber machine gun. On Sept. 12, 1918, he test-fired the weapon in Colt’s pasture near Hartford, Conn. A month later – Nov. 15, four days after the Armistice – he fired 877 rounds in bursts of 100 to 150 before government officials. Reporters asked the Utah inventor to what he attributed the feat. Browning said, “One drop of genius in a barrel of sweat wrought this miracle.”

It all traced back to Ogden.

The first gun John created was as crude as Pappy’s workshop. Ten-year-old John enlisted 5-year-old brother Matt while their father ran errands. He dug out a busted flintlock stock, a scrap of wood and a few feet of wire, clamped the barrel in a vise and sawed off the damaged muzzle. Matt filed a strip along the barrel to clean metal while John hatcheted a three-foot stock, then wired and soldered barrel to wood. A tin cone screwed near the flash hole kept priming from flashing back. The gun had no hammer or trigger.

They peered outside to ensure Jonathan was gone, then stole enough powder and shot from his hidden hoard. Powder
was precious, and their father a stern disciplinarian.

The plan was simple, risky. John told Matt to heat a pine sliver in smoldering coals until it glowed and thrust it into the priming pan. Barefoot and anxious, they slipped into open country minutes from the shop. Frontier hunters shot into packs of fowl to save powder, so the boys stalked three prairie chickens dusting within 40 to 50 feet.

John knelt, shouldered the stock and whispered, “Now.” Matt’s first jab singed John’s hair. The second set off the crude gun. Recoil knocked John down – “I went down on my hunkers,” he later said. Smoke cleared to reveal one bird dead, two crippled. Matt chased them down, “a bird in each hand, whooping and trying to wring both necks at once.”

Celebration soon gave way to dread. They had to explain using Jonathan’s powder.

Elizabeth offered cover: “In the morning we’ll have prairie chickens and biscuits for breakfast,” she said. Jonathan started eating before the boys were called in. When he asked where the birds came from, John told the story, including the stolen powder.

Jonathan said nothing, finished his meal, then asked, “John Mose, let me see that gun.” He examined it, set it down and said, “John Mose, you’re going on 11; can’t you make a better gun than that?” He walked to the shop.

John was crushed. He followed, unwound the wire, broke the stock over his foot and tossed the pieces on the kindling pile – then went back to work. The sting fueled him.

Three years later, just after his 13th birthday, fate handed him a challenge. As the story goes, a freighter, whiskey on his breath, brought in a mangled single-shot percussion shotgun. Repairs would cost more than a new gun, so the freighter bought one of John’s reconditioned pieces for a $10-gold piece and, as he left, tossed the wreck to John: “Hey, younker, want a gun?”

The teen stared at the ruin, cursed and drew his father’s rebuke. Then came clarity. “Boy-like, I had been trying to do the job all at once with some kind of magic,” he later said, “and magic never made a gun that would work.”

Through the night he dismantled the gun “down to the last screw” and realized he could make every part himself. He forged replacements on the foot-powered lathe Jonathan had hauled from Illinois in 1852. Weeks later he finished the barrel. Jonathan, rarely given to praise, let him saw stock wood from a prized walnut plank. “Pappy nearly came right out and said so,” John joked years later.

He would say he could have invented a gun at 20, but invention still seemed “far beyond the mountains, mysterious.” The transformation was gradual, though Jonathan noticed. One January day in 1878, shortly before John’s 23rd birthday, he studied an odd factory gun and muttered, “I could make a better gun than that.”

“I know you could, John Mose,” Jonathan said, locking eyes. “And I wish you’d get to it. I’d like to live to see you do it.”

Jonathan sold the shop to John and Matt for $500 on Jan. 7, 1878; Browning & Bros. was born. Matt kept the books; John sketched designs. On May 12, 1879, he applied for his first patent, the John M. Browning Single Shot Rifle. The patent was granted Oct. 7, 1879, as U.S. Patent No. 220,271 – less than four months after Jonathan died June 21, 1879, at 74.

John thought his father died “of weariness,” but not before knowing his son had become a gunmaker. Before passing, Jonathan test-fired the prototype.

“He stood as straight as he had at the turkey shoots in Tennessee,” John recalled. “Loaded, closed the action, fired, snapped out the empty and asked for another cartridge.”

No words were necessary.